Dead Center: Card Centering

Is your card centered enough to grade? Dead Center measures it in seconds, before you pay to send it in.

PHOTOGRAPH, MEASURE, DECIDE
Line the card up in the guide and take a photo, or pick one you already took. Dead Center finds the card's edges, flattens the photo so a tilted phone can't skew the result, and measures all four borders: white, colored and silver. No card to hand? "Try a sample card" measures a made-up card that comes with the app. You get the left/right and top/bottom centering, like 55/45 or 60/40, and which way the art is off.

SAME PHOTO, SAME ANSWER
No guessing and no AI "grade". The measurement is plain geometry, so the same photo always gives the same numbers. It also tells you how sure it is: if the borders are hard to read, you'll see a ± range instead of false precision.

FINE-TUNE BY HAND
Drag any border line or card corner, with a magnifier to place it exactly. When a photo can't be read on its own, Adjust by hand shows it with the card's corners for you to place, then the border lines. A full-art card with a printed frame line can be measured to the line the same way.

FRONT AND BACK
Measure the back too, and Dead Center shows the best grade centering alone allows at PSA, BGS, CGC and SGC, and whether the front or the back is holding it back. When the centering misses a company's next limit, you see by how much: the measured ratio, like 56.7/43.3, against the limit it needs, like 55/45, and which border is wide. Centering is only part of a grade: corners, edges and surface can only lower it.

KEEP AND SHARE
Save your cards with a name to compare later. Share a clean image of the card with its centering lines and ratios for sale and trade posts.

PLAN A SUBMISSION
Measure a stack of cards one after another and Dead Center sorts them by the best grade centering alone allows at the company you pick, with borderline cards marked. Share the plan as text or a CSV file for your submission form.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN
Your photos stay on your phone. There's no account and no sign-in, and Settings > Delete my data erases everything.

Dead Center is free, with one small banner ad that never covers the card while you measure. There are no pop-up ads and no paywall.

Dead Center is not affiliated with or endorsed by PSA, Beckett (BGS), CGC or SGC. Grade bands are from each company's published centering standards.

Recent changes:
First release of Dead Center: photograph a card, see its centering and the best grade it allows.